> Doesn’t mention if they went into Spotify’s Settings—>Audio Quality to set it to the non-default ’Very High’ (=320Kbps). The experience described makes me think no

The reviewer begins by giving a rundown of quite a range of equipment they use, their knowledge and enthusiasm about music technology, and how important sound quality is to their listening experience.

But you think they didn’t do the simplest and most obvious thing to maximize the sound quality on Spotify?

It's worth asking, sometimes people miss the obvious

> sometimes people miss the obvious

I agree. But one of my (many) bugbears with Spotify is the poor audio quality of their ‘best’ setting.

I haven’t tried Apple Music, but if Apple allowed access to their uncompressed stream through an API (currently only via AirPlay) to devices like my BlueSound Node then I would switch straight away.

Compared to CD, the best streaming quality from Spotify is pretty abysmal.

It's also highly questionable if anyone complaining about the audio quality would do that in an AB test. See gold plated cables etc.